Industry's First FPGA-Based AES Reference Design Highlights Altera's Booth Demonstrations at NAB2005

Altera Showcases Broadcast Industry Leadership With Comprehensive Set of Technical Solutions and Customer Successes

NAB2005, Las Vegas, April 11, 2005—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) announced today it will demonstrate the first compliant FPGA-based reference design for the AES3/EBU digital audio transmission protocol at the upcoming NAB2005, the annual National Association of Broadcasters Conference. The reference design features Altera’s Stratix^® and Cyclone™ series of FPGAs, which deliver lower cost, greater flexibility, shorter design cycles, and enhanced features compared to ASSP-based solutions. The FPGAs can integrate multiple audio interfaces to become a multiple-port application host that can be embedded with other video broadcast applications. Altera’s AES3/EBU solution also incorporates the functionality of an entire system onto a single FPGA, eliminating the need for spreading tasks over multiple devices.

Altera’s NAB2005 exhibit (booth C11212) will also include demonstrations of cost-effective, performance-intensive video standards implemented in FPGAs, including video-over-internet protocol (IP). The Altera^® video-over-IP reference design demonstrates transmission of MPEG-2 transport stream (TS) data over IP-based networks. The reference design functions as a bridge between one or more compressed video streams and IP packets carried over 100 megabits per second (Mbps) or one gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet. Next-generation compression schemes and industry-standard interfaces will also be on display.

“As the global audio and video market moves to all-digital broadcasting, professional broadcast equipment providers need to develop low-cost products supporting multiple audio/video formats, encoding/decoding schemes, and IT standards,” said Todd Scott, senior director of Altera’s digital consumer and broadcast business unit. “Our FPGA families deliver the flexible cost-effective solutions customers need to comply with rapidly evolving industry standards, enabling them to focus on their proprietary value-added design.”

“Altera’s Cylone II FPGA was the key enabling tool that allowed us to develop our latest SATA-based RAID 6 storage array, the MediaVault 4212,” said Mike Anderson, chief engineer of Huge Systems, a Ciprico company. “The high density and high speed attributes of Cyclone II FPGAs allowed us to design a single chip RAID 6 controller that doubled the performance and reliability of the MediaVault 4212, affording up to two disk failures with full data recovery. This critical requirement is an absolute must-have in high-availability applications, making the MediaVault 4212 the new benchmark in high-performance, high-availability storage.”

Altera’s support for the broadcast industry’s rapid adoption of programmable technology can be seen in several examples on display at NAB2005, including:

To learn more about Altera’s broadcast solutions at NAB2005, visit www.altera.com/education/events/northamerica/evt-nab.html.

To see how customers have used Altera products in broadcast applications, visit www.altera.com/broadcastsuccess.

About Altera

Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is the world’s pioneer in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions. Combining programmable logic technology with software tools, intellectual property, and technical services, Altera provides high-value programmable solutions to approximately 14,000 customers worldwide. More information is available at www.altera.com.

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